MONTGOMERY TWP. — Jay Brightman was about two miles from the finish line — the excitement of completing his first Boston Marathon welling inside him — when confusion and fear began to wash over the throng of spectators that had been cheering him along the route.

“Everybody suddenly wasn’t focused on the runners, there was something else going on and I wasn’t sure what it was,” the 53-year-old Brightman recalls. “Then, another runner next to me said, ‘I think there’s been some kind of explosion at the finish line.’”

Before the notion of terrorism crossed his mind, or panic could set in — Brightman knew his wife, Betsy, and the couple’s three children were probably somewhere along Boylston Street, near the finish line — he reached for the cellphone in his runner’s pouch and saw that Betsy had texted him to let him know the family was all right.

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Confusion turned to relief, then disappointment that he was finally stopped from running about a half-mile before the finish line, and then horror in the ensuing hours and days when Brightman learned, along with the rest of the world, that two bombs had been detonated, killing three people and wounding more than 260 others.

But the events of the day didn’t really sink in until he was back home in Montgomery Township, and those feelings became even more acute as time passed. “The emotions really come out when I look back on it now and think of what was going on and see what happened to these people who were killed or hurt,” Brightman says, his voice wavering.

Though Brightman, a certified public accountant, has lived in the North Penn area since 1996, his heart is still in Boston — the city from which he hails — and his ties to the area remain strong. He and Betsy frequently travel up to see their son, who attends college there, or to watch their beloved Red Sox play ball, or to visit friends from his undergrad days at the University of Massachusetts.

So it wasn’t even a question that Brightman would enter to run the Boston Marathon again this year. “Just being a part of it and supporting the community and showing our resilience is really, really important to me,” he says.

In fact, last June — a little more than two months after the bombing — Brightman ran in the 2013 Boston Athletic Association 10K race “because it was an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I want to support other runners and support the city,’” he says. “I was so happy to get out there and just run and be among the people.”

Running in the marathon this year is about something bigger than himself, but it was a personal quest that put Brightman in the midst of thousands of runners last year for his first attempt at an official 26.2-mile race.

“When I was living up there it was always a big event, and I always thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to run the Boston Marathon?’” he says. “And then I was approaching 50 and I started thinking, ‘Can I actually do this?’”

But a knee problem put that dream in doubt, and when Brightman went to see a specialist he was told he couldn’t run a marathon. “‘Put something else on your bucket list,’” Brightman recalls being told, letting out a laugh. He went to see a private trainer who told him that he just had some inflammation in his knee, and that if he did a certain set of exercises the pain would go away.

“So I tried them and sure enough the pain completely went away, so then in the fall of 2012 I ran a half-marathon in Boston, and then started training for last year’s marathon,” he says.

Although runners typically have to qualify to participate in the Boston Marathon based on their times in other marathons, some — like Brightman — are permitted to run on behalf of a charity for which they’re raising funds. Last year, Brightman ran for the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism, as one of his daughters is autistic.

This year, however, the Boston Athletic Association — which has organized the Boston Marathon since the race’s inception in 1897 — has said that any runners who didn’t finish last year due to the bombing can run this year just by paying the regular entrance fee, Brightman explains.

That means this year’s field of entrants will be much bigger than in years past, but Brightman doesn’t care about that — he can’t wait to run the streets of Boston again, with his whole family there once again to cheer him on.

“At the start you look out in front of you and you see this huge sea of people running, it’s really cool,” he says. “Every place you run through, there’s people along the street supporting you, little kids handing you oranges. It’s the only day I’ve actually felt like an athlete.”

He’s looking forward to finishing the marathon this time. But the larger meaning of the day will also be at the front of his mind.

“It’s like 9/11 — when something horrific happens, people always seem able to rise to the occasion — we come together and help each other out and it shows how great humankind is to one another,” says Brightman.

“I’m sure there will be a lot of tears shed the day of the race, and I’ll see things that make me really emotional while I’m running,” he says. “But it’s going to be a great day.”